The charm offensive isn’t working.

Over the past 24 hours, the Greenlandic government has dropped its previous posture of being shy and vague in the face of Mr. Trump’s pushiness. Instead, it has blasted him as “aggressive” and asked Europe for backup. And the planned visit may only strengthen the bonds between Greenland — an ice-covered land three times the size of Texas — and Denmark.

Better the colonial power you know than…Donald Trump.

Even the dogsled race has reacted coolly. The organizers of the race — the Avannaata Qimussersua, Greenland’s Super Bowl of dogsled races — said on Sunday of Ms. Vance and her son, “We did not invite them,” but added that the event was open to the public and “they may attend as spectators.”

Now that’s a snub.

Greenland says we didn’t invite them, we don’t want them, we’re not going to party with them, we think they’re rude to show up uninvited, we wish they would take a hint.

Greenland’s politicians have condemned plans for high-profile US visits, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s threats to take over the island.

Second Lady Usha Vance will make a cultural visit this week, and a separate trip is expected from Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.

Outgoing Greenlandic Prime Minister Mute Egede described the plan as aggressive, and said the duo had not been invited for meetings. Meanwhile, the island’s likely next leader accused the US of showing a lack of respect.

What’s a “cultural visit”? Especially one from a spouse of a government bigwig? A spouse who was not invited?

Waltz’s trip was confirmed by a source who spoke to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News. He is expected to visit before Mrs Vance and to travel with Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to the New York Times.

Outgoing PM Egede described Waltz’s visit in particular as a provocation. “What is the security advisor doing in Greenland? The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us,” he told Sermitsiaq newspaper.

Speaking to the same paper, Greenland’s probable next PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen accused the American officials of showing the local population a lack of respect.

If it’s any comfort, they show everyone a lack of respect.

Ugh.

Today:

I thought it was true for a few minutes, until I looked for more sources.

Nobody died. It’s the old “he’s dead to me.” His kid fell for the gender idiocy, and that’s a terrible thing, but it’s also a terrible thing – it’s a worse thing – to tell the world your kid is dead when what you mean is he went in a direction you can’t stand.

I don’t blame Musk for hating the direction, and I don’t blame him for being furious about the gender idiocy. I do blame him for turning that on the kid.

Mind you, it probably does feel like that. The kid he knew is gone, and that has to be brutal. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But still the kid is not literally dead. Estranged is not dead. Estranged is terrible, but it’s still not dead.

Vivian Wilson, a 20-year-old college student who was born Xavier Musk, swung back after her estranged father expressed his anguish over her gender transition and blamed the “woke mind virus” for fueling the surge in young people identifying as the opposite sex.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything, and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Ms. Wilson told NBC News in a Thursday phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Ms. Wilson, who legally changed her name and gender identification in 2022, said her father was largely absent during her childhood, calling him “cold,” “quick to anger,” “uncaring” and “narcissistic.”

Other than that he’s a real mensch.

Men who pretend to be women are not examples of “female leaders.” Ever. They’re the negation of female leaders. They’re men who shove their way into women’s everything and thus shove women out. Flattering and rewarding them for doing so is just another notch on the Comprehensive Attack on Women belt.

What credentials does Sam he/him have? What credentials are there? What is the body of specialized knowledge that qualifies people to talk about the alphabet people?

Sarah Ditum reviews a book by one of the tame feminist crowd:

The Guilty Feminist started in 2015 as a place for [Deborah] Frances-White to share lightweight material for women who liked the idea of the “feminist” label but weren’t sure about the detail. When Donald Trump arrived, though, Frances-White’s audience — and her self-perceived importance — ballooned.

…

You could argue that in the 2010s progressives began behaving like a cult: obsessed with internal obedience, utterly dislocated from the outside world.

Many people have made that observation about the left before now. What’s surprising about Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have is that Frances-White has joined them (she knows a thing or two about cults, having spent her adolescence in the Jehovah’s Witnesses). This book is her plea for progressives to rediscover critical thinking.

“The important thing,” she writes, “is that we stop and smell the analysis.” Leave aside the maddening question of who “we” refers to here (Frances-White’s first problem with “conversation” is that she clearly struggles to imagine a reader who doesn’t think like her). She happens to be correct.

…

I agree with her, but I’m not sure that she agrees with herself. Because ultimately, Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have is a mealy-mouthed imitation of robust intellectual inquiry. It is a coward’s idea of what bravery looks like. It is a conversation in the same way that shouting into a well and listening to your own echo is a conversation.

Frances-White attempts to tackle the cancellation of problematic historical figures, the limits of comedy and the question of whether history has a “right side”, among other topics. But, in light of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis farrago, let’s start with trans issues as a test of whether she’s actually evolved.

Also, frankly, let’s start with trans issues because they are so very often and regularly and predictably the place where otherwise thoughtful people plunge into a dark tunnel of confusion and lies.

These are addressed in a chapter called The Conversation About Gender Nonconformity. Even that title tells you Frances-White has decided the issue in advance: this isn’t “The Conversation About Whether We Should Give Teenagers Sterilising Medication” or “The Conversation About Whether It’s a Good Idea to Put Male Rapists Who Say They’re Women into Women’s Prisons”.

Not to mention the fact that trans ideology is the exact opposite of gender nonconformity. It’s all about gender conformity, and enforcing it: if you don’t gender conform you must be trans so you’d better admit it right now or you’ll be labeled internally transphobic.

The Cass report into the NHS’s provision of gender identity services for children has come out, as have several alarming cases of male sex offenders abusing gender self-identification. Frances-White can no longer simply call the other side bigots and otherwise ignore them. But because she’s working backwards from her conclusion that “the cis feminist and trans communities must align”, pesky reality still has to be put in its place.

So we are told that the Cass report has “raised concerns”, although conveniently those concerns are too extensive to be summarised by Frances-White. “A deep analysis would require its own chapter or perhaps book.” You’ll just have to take her on trust. Take a deep breath and revel in the distinctive scent of no analysis whatsoever.

…

Perhaps most embarrassingly, she claims that “it is difficult to find historical examples of public campaigns that target individuals or call for censorship from the left”. Which revises Stalin out of history in a way that Stalin himself could only admire.

Stalin and his global band of Stalinists. The internecine wars between Trots and Stalinists in the 1930s make even the terf wars look tame. (No axes to the head so far.)

I won’t be reading this book but Sarah’s review is a treat.

The stats are all every which way.

From a GP agreeing to change the documented identity of a baby because its mother was raising it in the “gender” of her choice to male sex offenders being recorded by the police as “women”, data and official statistics have been “corrupted” by extreme gender ideology, a report found this week.

The government-commissioned investigation by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology and research specialist at University College London, revealed that public bodies – including the NHS, the police and even the military – have been collecting information on gender identity rather than biological sex since 2015. As a consequence “robust and accurate data” have been lost.

The NHS, for instance, lets individuals or their parents change the sex on their records.

In the Sullivan Review, one paediatrician and safeguarding expert who was consulted for the report gave a shocking example of a mother who changed the gender identity of her child when it was still a baby. “The child had been brought up in the preferred gender of the mother which was different to their birth assigned gender. She had gone to the GP and requested a change of gender/NHS number when the baby was a few weeks old and the GP had complied. Children’s Social Care did not perceive this as a child protection issue.”

Jayzus. How twisted is that? Not even the radically individualistic “I get to choose what sex I am” but the radically individualistic by proxy “I get to choose what sex my existing baby is.”

But patients can also be affected another way. The General Medical Council recently admitted that more than 60 doctors in the UK had changed their gender. There have been several cases where a member of medical staff has claimed to be one sex, but is in fact, another. This has raised questions as to whether – for example – a female patient can consent to an intimate examination by someone she is told is a woman doctor, when in fact the doctor is male.

And it’s not even just that. The pretend woman aspect is horrific but so is the wacko doctor aspect. Excuse me doctor but I don’t want a doctor who is deranged and/or confused enough to think she/he is the sex she/he is not, or one who is self-absorbed and entitled enough to live out this lie on the job. We want our doctors to be reasonably sane and in touch with reality, don’t we? And we want them to be aware of our needs, don’t we? We want doctors who are there to fix our ailments and promote our health, rather than to play out their kinky fun-loving fantasies about themselves, don’t we?

The article goes on to discuss the consequences for the police, schools, government and the military. Havoc everywhere.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Shared realities.

The book in question is called Open Play: The Case for Feminist Sport, by Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford. One of the blurbs quoted on its Amazon page says:

“Sport has been in desperate need of a fresh, nuanced approach to gender, one which has women, nonbinary, and trans people at its core. Open Play challenges the patriarchal system that has dictated women’s participation in sport around the world. Its philosophy is simple yet revolutionary amongst the status quo of so-called ‘feminist’ approaches to sport. This book is not just a must-read, it should become foundational in the future of women’s sport from the grassroots to professional levels.” — Flo Lloyd-Hughes, sports writer and broadcaster

Sport doesn’t need any approach to gender, desperate or otherwise. Someone wanting to introduce this kind of “nuance” into this topic wants to see men on women’s podiums, and in women’s changing rooms. It’s not gendered souls out on the track, it’s not one’s innermost, true self doing laps in the pool, we’re not seeing how high a bar someone’s “identity” can clear, it’s sexed, physical bodies of flesh, blood, and bone that are reliably known to actually exist, that are competing. The concept of “gender identity” can’t muster enough substance to hold the kind of Gordian Knot that gender ideology, to the exclusion of all others, claims to be able to unravel. Please. You can’t tie a knot in either jello or smoke, and they’re both more real than “gender identity” will ever be.

It is not possible for women, and nonbinary, and trans people to be simultaneously at the core of anything. There’s no room at the inn, and trans identified males want to play Jesus and hog the manger. In practice, attempts to do this have always centered men’s wants and desires over women’s rights and needs. Women get shunted to the side whenever “gender” has to be taken into consideration, which, unlike sex, is a completely invisible, immaterial, undefinable, unmeasurable “entity” that is likely nothing more than an aspect of personality. Do we segregate sports by whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert? No. That’s not a salient criterion. Sex is, and no amount of handwaving is going to hide that fact.

“Nonbinary” females and trans identified females are still female; nothing that they do can change that. Hormone “treatments” that render them ineligible for participation in female sports are not the concern of female sports leagues; it’s a completely understandable consequence of the choices they’ve made, and nobody is obligated to make any accommodation for them whatsoever. Find a team or league that will accept you as you are, assuming you can make the cut. Similarly “nonbinary” males and trans identified males remain males. If the “treatments” they have chosen to subject themselves to result in their no longer being good enough to play on a men’s team, that’s too bad; join the billions of other men not good enough to make men’s teams. Don’t expect women to admit you to their leagues, because you’re not women, and never will be, however much you suppress your testosterone levels. Women are not just “men with low testosterone.” It’s insulting to women to pretend they are, and that monkeying around with T is all you need to do to become female.

It looks like the authors are trying to portray women’s sport as some kind of patriarchal ghetto to which women have been unfairly and unjustly “confined”, rather than a precious refuge which they have had to carve out for themselves against centuries of opposition, ridicule, and hostility. The basic physiological differences between male and female bodies (whatever the degree of overlap there may occasionally be within some parameters when comparing men and women) are real. They are not “cultural constructs” that can be overcome by women trying “harder.” It is not in any way “victimizing” or “infantilizing” women to acknowledge these physiological differences between the sexes. These differences call for separation of sport by sex, to ensure safe, fair competition, particularly for women. This is not a punishment. It is, to use the terminology of gender identity, an actual safe space for women, and a hard won space at that. But if you don’t know (or worse, refuse to acknowledge) what a woman even is, you’re not going to be able to understand (or you’re going to pretend to not understand) this need. Any “inclusive” definition of “woman” is solely for the benefit of men. They’re going to pretend to be “liberating” women from these patriarchal “cultural constructs” of imaginary physical differences between men and women in order to let men into women’s sport. That’s the only point of all of this, and there’s nothing in it for women. They can only lose.

Its philosophy is simple yet revolutionary amongst the status quo of so-called ‘feminist’ approaches to sport.

Uh-oh: “SO-CALLED ‘FEMINIST’ ALERT”. Presumably meaning the boring kind of feminism that wants to reserve women’s sport to women. How shameful! They want to “exclude” non-women from women’s sport, like Lammy’s feminist “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights.” The authors of this book are the fun, intersectional kind of “feminist” (see, we can use scare quotes too), who want to prevent women from having anything of their own demand inclusivity above all. Tell me: which group of feminists actually has the real interests and safety of women in mind as their first and only priority? Not the one who thinks that “gender” needs to be at the “core” of sports.

Are we sleepwalking?

Eviscerating the federal government and subjugating Congress; defying court orders and delegitimising judges; deporting immigrants and arresting protesters without due process; chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions; cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule. Add a rightwing media ecosystem manufacturing consent and obeyance in advance, along with a weak and divided opposition offering feeble resistance. Join all the dots, critics say, and America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism.

I don’t think sleepwalking is the right word, on account of how we’re not asleep. It’s more that we’re helpless. We would stop him if we could, but we can’t.

The 45th and 47th president has wasted no time in launching a concerted effort to consolidate executive power, undermine checks and balances and challenge established legal and institutional norms. And he is making no secret of his strongman ambitions.

Trump, 78, has declared “We are the federal law” and posted a social media image of himself wearing a crown with the words “Long live the king”. He also channeled Napoleon with the words: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And JD Vance has stated that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”.

Trump quickly pardoned those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, placed loyalists in key positions within the FBI and military and purged the justice department, which also suffered resignations in response to the dismissal of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams after his cooperation on hardline immigration measures.

The president now has the courts in his sights. Last weekend the White House defied a judge’s verbal order blocking it from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to justify the deportation of 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador, where they will be held in a 40,000-person megaprison.

…

Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, noted that Democrats and their allies have filed more than 125 cases against various attacks on the rule of law and obtained more than 40 temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.

“We’re in the fight of our lives,” he told the Guardian. “This is not a two week, two month or even two year fight that we’re in. This is going to take us many years to defeat the forces of authoritarian reaction and the Democrats are rising to the occasion.

“If you look at he way democratic societies responded to fascism a century ago, it just takes time for people to realign and refocus and mobilise a concerted and unified response. Are we there yet? No. But are we going to be in a place where we can stand together and defeat authoritarianism in our country? Yes, we are going to get there.”

Here’s hoping.

What I’m saying.

What is belief, what are views, what is a concept?

From The Times:

As a scientist at Porton Down developing technology to secure Britain’s defences, Peter Wilkins never imagined he would be considered a threat because of a belief in biology.

But when he stated his gender-critical views and support for the concept of immutable sex, Wilkins was reported for his “ideology” and labelled by colleagues as transphobic, “sad and pathetic” and “a rubbish employee”.

It’s all so weird. What is a “belief in biology”?

Knowing that men are not women is not a belief, it’s just awareness of an obvious and ubiquitous reality. Humans come in two sexes; one of each is required for the manufacture of all humans. That’s not a belief, it’s how things are. We don’t need any effort from the organ of belief to be aware of this fact. It doesn’t involve prayer or faith or an odd costume or weeks of fasting or a holy book.

An employment tribunal has found there was a “clear hostile animus” towards gender-critical beliefs at the top-secret Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). It found that an intimidating atmosphere resulted in the harassment and discrimination of Wilkins, 43, who was forced to leave as a result.

That is, a clear hostile animus toward the truth at a science and technology lab, which forced a scientist to leave because he was aware of the (obvious, familiar, part of the fabric of life) truth. Bully the scientists out because they’re cognizant of basic facts. Much sensible.

Speaking after he won a two-year legal battle with DTSL, Wilkins still appears slightly bemused that he had to have the argument. “It’s a scientific organisation,” he said, “so it shouldn’t be unacceptable to use the phrase biological sex.”

My point exactly.

“And it was pretty hurtful, really, having spent 15 years working for DSTL on some things which were high-security, to be told that we think you’re a security risk because you have these fairly normal, run-of-the-mill, factual beliefs about sex and genders.”

Not so much fairly normal as utterly completely absurdly normal. So normal that it’s laughable. Did a woman and a man make you? Or did a miracle occur? Which “belief” is more wack?

The case underlines how parts of the civil service have been affected by the debate, with abuse of gender-critical philosophy waged on an internal blog that DSTL employees would use to discuss the issue, often during work time. At least one other person has left the ­organisation over “spats” on the blog.

Oh gosh, Porton Down sounds like the UK branch of Pharyngula.

Wilkins had worked for DSTL for 15 years, including secondments to support operations in Afghanistan and a role attracting innovative technology into defence. In August 2021, when the neuroscientist Sophie Scott was awarded the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize, a DSTL employee wrote on the internal blog that it was “pretty disheartening” given that Scott was “well known for her non-inclusive views on trans and non-binary people”. Another wrote that it emboldened transphobes.

Yep. Pharyngula goes to Wiltshire.

Wilkins complained to moderators that this was “deeply unfair” to Scott, who had simply applied her scientific expertise to her views. It left the implication, he warned, that anyone with gender-critical beliefs should not receive public recognition for their work.

His concerns were not properly acted upon. In the following months a string of blog posts demeaned people with such views. One DSTL employee wrote that explicitly stating gender-critical beliefs was “abusive”. Another describ­ed gender criticism as bigotry and one said those who supported gender-critical views led “sad pathetic little lives”.

Been there, seen that.

Paul Kealey, head of counterterrorism at Porton Down, was singled out for criticism. He told Wilkins that while staff were permitted to hold gender-critical beliefs, it was “not OK to express such views in the workplace”.

It’s not ok to express, in a scientific workplace, “views” that men are not women and women are not men. It is ok to express in a scientific workplace that men can be women and women can be men. How does that make sense?

Wilkins resigned in November 2022, citing a hostile, intimidating and ­degrading environment. The tribunal concluded that he was constructively dismissed.

For the crime of knowing which sex is which.

Erm…

As a few thousand people are pointing out, it’s not really a brilliant idea to send babies and toddlers and young children off to a swim night that’s “inclusive” of adults. It looks more like procurement than like jolly splashy fun with your friends.

Waaaaaa Columbia wouldn’t give him $400 million waaaaaa it’s not fair.

Columbia needed to expand, which is tricky in Manhattan. Trump wanted Columbia to buy a patch he had more than two miles away. He wanted Columbia to pay $400 million for it.

As the discussions dragged on, many people from Columbia grew frustrated with their dealings with Mr. Trump. Still, the two sides set up a meeting in a Midtown Manhattan conference room with the intention of moving a transaction forward.

A few trustees and administrators arrived with a report prepared on their behalf by a real estate team at Goldman Sachs, which attended every meeting between Columbia officials and representatives of the Trump Organization. It outlined what the investment bank considered a fair value for the land.

Mr. Trump showed up late, was informed of the university’s property analysis and became incensed.

Goldman Sachs had assigned a value in the range of $65 million to $90 million, according to a person who was in the room. In an attempt to soothe Mr. Trump, a trustee offered that the university would be willing to pay the top of the range.

It didn’t matter. A furious Mr. Trump walked out less than five minutes after the meeting had started.

How dare anyone refuse to pay Donald Trump way more than the value of a property in the wrong location?

Mr. Trump also shared his indignation in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Years after the deal fell through,” the newspaper said, “Trump is still irate. ‘They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,’” Mr. Trump told the reporter and called Mr. Bollinger a “total moron.”

Mr. Trump was perhaps staying true to principles outlined in “How To Get Rich,” an advice book he co-wrote a few years after his deal with Columbia went sour.

One chapter is titled “Sometimes You Have to Hold a Grudge.”

In short he’s always been a mean ignorant swine but now he has real power. All we can do is hope his brain explodes sooner rather than later.

Bahahahahaha Trump the salesman. Oh hai allies, we’re selling you dud fighter jets, you’re welcome.

Another small item from the Horror Files:

The Trump administration has sidelined a senior Defense Department spokesman, defense officials said Thursday, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure in which he clashed with colleagues and journalists who cover the Pentagon, and aggressively defended the agency’s purge of government-produced content recognizing the contributions of minorities in the military.

He’s a bit too aggressive for the spokesy thing, but he’s not gone, he’s just moved.

Ullyot’s removal followed an uproar Wednesday over the Pentagon’s removal of an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in 1947, after serving in the U.S. Army. As news of the article’s removal drew widespread condemnation on social media, Ullyot released a statement attempting to explain the administration’s rationale — striking an unusually combative tone for a spokesman representing the view of a government agency with a nonpartisan national security mission.

“Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” his statement said in part, “ … Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.”

Geddit? DEI. Hurhur, that’s so witty.

Trump and the political appointees he’s positioned throughout the federal government have worked vigorously to end initiatives that promote diversity, equity and inclusion within the workforce, and to scrub from government websites and social media accounts most references to those terms. The Pentagon issued its order last month, days after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired several senior military leaders they deemed overly focused on diversity.

I hate to be all both sidesy about it but sometimes it can’t be helped. Some DEI stuff is overdone or intrusive or self-admiring or all those, but that doesn’t mean equality and diversity and inclusion are bad in all forms on all occasions. Not even close. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with educating the public about talented women or immigrants or people of color.

The Jackie Robinson article was restored on the Defense Department website later Wednesday, but the reversal did little to quell the furor. On Thursday morning, ESPN television personality Stephen A. Smith took up the issue, saying he does not think the article was removed in error and that it follows what he called a pattern of the president’s supporters ignoring why DEI efforts existed in the first place.

Smith, who is Black, said on ESPN’s “First Take” that the administration is “going about the business of trying to scrub history” to the point that even Robinson is targeted. Smith noted that Robinson was drafted into military service in 1942, court-martialed in 1944 for refusing an order from a superior officer to move to the back of a bus, and honorably discharged from the Army.

See, I didn’t know that about the court martial or the disgusting order.

The Washington Post offers a refresher course on due process:

The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.

“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”

How did this guy pass his citizenship test?

As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.

More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, convinced the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”

Yebbut what about when a judge gives a legal opinion contrary to the will of Donald Trump? Or Elon Musk? Whole different kettle of fish, babe.

[Musk and friends] have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times.

…

There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Which being interpreted means: This is a dictatorship.

Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic,” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”

Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.

Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do these things.

“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.

For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man … should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.

If only we could.

At least Trump is paying attention to the important stuff.

Trump on Friday escalated his administration’s threats against those who destroy Tesla vehicles, pondering on social media whether he should send them to a prison in El Salvador where officials last week sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants who they allege are members of a violent gang.

Trump also wrote that people who vandalize or destroy Tesla vehicles — made by the company owned by Trump ally Elon Musk — could get lengthy jail sentences.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote on social media. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

Hur hur. Why is that so funny? Because it’s Trump who has been sending migrants to those very prisons, which is why they’ve “become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.” His hilarious joke is about his own all-out war on human rights. Foreign Policy has details:

When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Central America in February on his first official trip abroad, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele made him an unusual offer: El Salvador would receive and detain people deported from the United States, as well as U.S. citizens convicted of crimes. Rubio described Bukele’s proposal as an “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country” and said on X that it would make the United States safer.

Last weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump took Bukele up on his offer. The White House used an oblique 18th-century law written during wartime to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, violating a federal judge’s ruling to halt the expulsions. The United States reportedly paid El Salvador $6 million to detain the migrants.

…

El Salvador and its prison system operate under what is known legally as a “state of exception.” In 2022, at Bukele’s request, the Salvadoran legislature authorized an emergency declaration to combat gang violence. The declaration suspended basic due process rights for Salvadorans and foreign nationals whom authorities accuse of being affiliated with gangs. Since then, the police and military have detained at least 85,000 people without judicial warrants, according to El Salvador’s legislature.

El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2 percent of the population in prison. The country’s prison population has exploded from an already overcrowded 38,000 people at the beginning of Bukele’s administration in 2019 to an estimated 120,000 people today. Most prisoners have not yet been convicted of any crime.

…

If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons.

Cristosal and other human rights organizations have documented credible evidence of sexual assault and rape against women and children detained under the state of exception. The combination of harsh conditions and systematic physical torture has caused the deaths of at least 367 people, according to documentary, photographic, and forensic evidence gathered by Cristosal’s investigators. Salvadoran authorities deny that torture and killings occur in the country’s prisons.

In the majority of those cases, our researchers found that detainees had no criminal records and no evidence of gang tattoos. None had been convicted of any crime at the time of their deaths.

Trump is publicly gloating about threatening to send people who damage Musk’s toys to that hell. That’s where we are.

Erm…isn’t that called extortion? Isn’t it a crime?

Trump rescinds executive order after law firm agrees to provide $40m in free services

Donald Trump rescinded an executive order targeting a prominent Democratic-leaning law firm after it agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals.

The White House has targeted law firms whose lawyers have provided legal work that Trump disagrees with. Last week, he issued an order threatening to suspend active security clearances of attorneys at Paul, Weiss and to terminate any federal contracts the firm has.

But the president suddenly reversed course following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, over the White House order.

In other words Trump extorted $40 million in free legal services by threatening a law firm. That’s technically known as a “crime.”

Trump’s order singled out the work of Mark Pomerantz, who previously worked at the firm and who oversaw an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into Trump’s finances before Trump became president. Pomerantz once likened the president to a mob boss.

To avoid the consequences of Trump’s order, the White House said, the firm had agreed to “take on a wide range of pro bono matters that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society”. The firm reportedly agreed to disavow the use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its hiring and promotion decisions and to dedicate the equivalent of $40m in free legal services to support Trump administration policies on issues including assistance for veterans and countering antisemitism.

The firm, the White House claimed, also acknowledged the wrongdoing of Pomerantz, the partner involved in the investigation into Trump’s hush-money payments to an adult film actor. It was unclear whether Karp was aware of that claim.

In a statement issued by the White House, Karp said: “We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss. We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration.”

They are gratified that Trump succeeded in extorting their humiliating surrender. Sure they are.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.

Today, members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” team showed up at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which helps to fund libraries and museums across the country and whose elimination Trump called for in an executive order last week. They sent employees home, swore in a new acting director in the lobby, and proceeded to cancel contracts and grants.

So we can’t have libraries and museums? Why not?

Even as this dismantling was going on, District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander was blocking the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data at the Social Security Administration and ordering them to destroy copies of any personal information they have already accessed. “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”

Also today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who said the government could not use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify sending migrants to a prison in El Salvador, appeared to be out of patience with the government’s obfuscation of what actually happened in the process of that rendition last weekend. Boasberg’s order today laid out that he had repeatedly asked the government to provide information about the flights but that the government had “evaded its obligations,” providing only general information about the flights and appearing to cast about for further delays.

“This is woefully insufficient,” Boasberg wrote. He required that the government explain by March 25 why its failure to return the flights as ordered did not violate the court order to do so. Far from backing down, the administration appears to be considering escalating its fight with the courts. Devlin Barrett of the New York Times reported today that lawyers in the Trump administration believe the 1798 Alien Enemies Act Trump used to deport migrants also permits federal agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant, an assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Trump White House and its MAGA supporters appear to be trying to cement their power to control the government by undermining the rule of law and the judges who are defending it. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday called Judge Boasberg a “Democrat activist,” although he was originally appointed by President George W. Bush, and badly misrepresented Boasberg’s order. She also attacked Boasberg’s wife for her political donations.

In Talking Points Memo this morning, David Kurtz recorded how MAGA supporters Elon Musk and Laura Loomer have attacked Boasberg’s daughter, and in Rolling Stone, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng noted that that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, accused Boasberg of “attempting to meddle in national security,” adding: “This one federal judge thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot.”

Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”

So they don’t care what the laws are. So they’re telling us right up front they’re dictators and we can’t stop them.

Kurtz noted that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings on the many injunctions against the Trump administration. Kurtz also noted that angry Trump supporters have called in bomb threats against judges who have stood against Trump’s excesses, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and have sent anonymous pizza deliveries to the homes of judges and their relatives as a way to demonstrate that “we know where you live.”

Perez and Suebsaeng reported that the White House’s strategy is to “move fast” before courts can stop them. In the end, one source close to the president told them that the president’s ultimate power over judges comes from the fact that they do not command an army, while he does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the advisor asked, apparently confident that the answer is no.

The attack of Trump and his MAGA supporters on the courts and the rule of law has illustrated how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky told Amanda Taub of the New York Times. Along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote How Democracies Die. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” Levitsky said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the courts, and thus the country’s legal system, appears to have kicked the alarm about the dismantling of the U.S. government into a new phase. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran op-eds today from law professors detailing the lawlessness of the Trump administration and warning that the courts will not be able to stop Trump and his administration from their authoritarian takeover of the government.

In the New York Times, Georgetown University professor of law Stephen Vladeck has faith that the courts will try to rein Trump in, while in the Washington Post, Harvard Law School professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale University professor of law and history Samuel Moyn are less convinced that the judges Trump himself appointed will stand against him, but all three of them warn that stopping Trump will require the people to demand “far more aggressive oversight from members of Congress,” as Vladeck puts it. Doerfler and Moyn wrote that “real resistance must take place in Congress, at government workplaces, and in the streets.”

That the courts are in the position of trying to stop a president who is ignoring the Constitution reflects that Republicans in Congress appear to have taken off the table impeachment, the political remedy the Constitution’s framers put into our system for such a crisis.

Stick a knife in us, we’re done.

I found a nice paperback The Best American Travel Writing 2010 in a Little Free Library a few days ago, and opened it yesterday evening all eager for the treat. Until I read the contents page.

Twenty one articles.

Twenty of them written by men.

One whole entire article out of 21 was by a woman.

Really dude? One?

Because women don’t travel? Because women can’t write? Because you forget that women exist? What? What’s the problem here?

The editor for this one was Bill Buford; the series editor is Jason Wilson. Wouldn’t you think one of them would have noticed? I would.

So I’ll be putting that book back in the LFB, or perhaps the recycle bin, unread.